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One yawned.
A wormhole yawned in its sleep and the yawn ricocheted through a stack of realities like a snapped powerline, and suddenly everyone could see a new glittering gap in the sky and on the other side of that gap lay the far side of the galaxy, unexplored, untapped, unreachable by the usual party ships until that moment. On the other side lay the Sziv and the Voorpret and the Vulna and an intelligent twilit mega-hurricane called Hrodos and the Ursulas and the 321 and the Smaragdi and, far beyond even them, a small, watery, excitable planet called Earth.
Unfortunately, the Yüz thought the Alunizar had blown their royals out of the sky, the Alunizar were convinced that the Yüz had decided to push back their colonies for no good reason at all, a band of Keshet single-timeline-separatists took credit for the moons but blamed the frigates on the Slozhit, the Utorak and the Meleg had disputed ownership of the pulsar for generations and each assumed the other had finally gotten sick of messing about discussing things like adults, and the Elakhon quietly seethed about the theft of their long-dead emperor’s bathtub but, in ord
er not to compound the offense by dishonoring Musmar’s philosophy of neutrality, simply started selling weapons to positively everyone. Half the Milky Way was already steaming by the time they encountered the meat of the other half, and the Sentience Wars progressed at record speed from confusion and posturing to, in technical terms, an intergalactic shitshow.
Thankfully, the Sex Pistols weren’t really much for apples and pears anyway and never noticed anything amiss.
12.
Come on, I’ll Give You a Flower
In the thirteen minutes and eleven seconds that elapsed between Oort St. Ultraviolet waking from dreams of his daughters growing up and refusing to visit at Christmas and the abrupt disappearance of Decibel Jones from the backseat of a gently used BMW 760Li, the entity known as the roadrunner built a ship capable of traveling at many times the speed of light, engaging in a mild spot of dogfighting, providing roomy accommodations with plenty of lunch, life support, and legroom for four, and making the most advanced human aircraft wet itself and crumple into a heap wondering just what had it been doing with its life.
Aerospace engineers around the world, take note.
The tall blue flamingo-fish reached up and scooped the gelatinous green hair accessory off her head like a woman removing an earring at the end of a long day. The alien presented the gummy flower to two of the three Absolute Zeros with obvious pride, though it was no bigger than a paper watercooler cup and parts of it were crusted over with tiny yellow and pinkish warts and all of it smelled like Brighton Beach at low tide.
“I require a substrate,” chirped the Esca happily. “Are you terribly attached to your headphones?”
Oort St. Ultraviolet, deeply apologetic creator of the maddening earworm that was the current West Cornwall Pasty Company jingle, “Live and Let Pie,” somewhat reluctantly handed over his bespoke Kuu & Co. oversize, overear, oversensitive headphones in the limited edition Phantom Pearl color scheme.
“I promise you, Oort,” said the roadrunner with soothing protectiveness, “in terms of audiovisual equipment, anything you have down here, we can do better up there, and . . . well, everything else, too. It’s not your fault. No one expects more from a species that still uses electric kettles.”
Very carefully, the roadrunner slid her jellied barrette onto the left cup of the headphones and set it all down on Oort’s coffee table. It wobbled there for a moment, then thin gluey tentacles shot out and covered the space where a human head was meant to fit with a fleshy semitransparent spiderweb. The mouth of the flower suckled at the air expectantly. The Esca poured a pint glass of whole milk directly into that almost obscene little polyp, then fed in a large, raw, well-marbled rib eye steak that Oort had fished out of the freezer and shoved into the microwave, whereupon the most piercingly awkward silence of his life descended as his estranged former bandmate and a giant feathered alien waited for the defrost cycle to finish.
“It’s a kilo steak. I bought it to share with the girls on Saturday,” Oort had mumbled sheepishly. “Cheaper than buying three.” Capo meowed and glanced meaningfully at her empty food bowl. “It takes twenty minutes.” He’d picked at his fingernails and prayed for death. “Sorry.”
The phlegmy flower chewed the defrosted meat down, inch by inch, with obvious satisfaction.
“Lucky thing you had rib eye,” the roadrunner mused, unsettlingly, in Oort’s mother’s voice. “We might have had to waste time popping down to the shop. Sirloin doesn’t have the necessary fat content, you know. Fat’s just the thing for spaceflight. Fat, and calcium.”
“I should call Justine,” Oort said suddenly. “The girls will worry—”
But the man Rolling Stone once called “Orpheus reincarnated as the holiday decor section of Debenhams” did not get to say what he wanted to tell his daughters or the wife he’d ignored in favor of a music studio far too many times, as things began to happen at an astonishing rate.
Razor-sharp metallic snowflakes erupted fractally out of the seaflower-headphone combo platter. Fluorescent black coral shot out of it like parachutes deploying. Those thin tentacles or stamens or vines or what-have-you shot out everywhere, grabbing whatever they could find and cramming it into a rapidly expanding mint-jelly maw. In went delicate glass sculptures from Baku, Paris, Lodz, Prague. Out burst pitted, rough red prongs that reminded Oort of the reef he’d snorkeled in the Maldives with Mark Ronson just before Mark, and the Maldives, died. In went his juicer, his espresso machine, his electric kettle, his microwave. The thing on his coffee table vomited forth ropy sapphire starfish-legs that wrapped around the table and gobbled that up too. The whole rubbish heap crashed to the floor, hauling in table lamps and the hallway chandelier after it. Tongues of spiral wire coral snatched his tablet projector, his wafer-screen television, his gaming rig, his wineglasses. The little crusty warts polka-dotting the flower’s distended gullet detonated, covering the now more or less Volkswagen-size love child of the Great Barrier Reef and Oort’s tastefully appointed suburban home in a swarm of what appeared to be yellow-and-fuchsia-striped fish. More polyps gushed out of the holes in the coral, some the same gummy jade color as the original, others in new and exciting wine pastille shades. Now their horrifying round mouths were ringed in a wild tentacular fringe, lurching down the hallway in search of pillows, linens, mobile phone chargers, and electronic readers.
Oort St. Ultraviolet watched in abject despair. All the physical evidence of his life on Earth was being torn to pieces and keelhauled into the maw of a hungry space flower as though his marriage, his children, his stable work life, his healthy income and investments achieved through years of prudent selling out, and his study of good interior design had just been a long, long setup for a truly mean-spirited punch line. He’d no idea what to do. He’d seen their band’s name at the bottom of the alien’s list, even if, at the time, he’d thought it was a curry-induced dream. If Dess was here, he’d probably already drafted them into an army of two to save the planet. Dess would do anything you asked if you fluttered your eyelashes and told him he was good. And, Oort supposed, he would as well, only no one had fluttered anything yet. If he hauled off and told them to leave his things alone and get out, would that doom humanity? It had to be taken as a serious possibility. In the face of the wanton destruction of all he had ever held dear, Oort uttered a furious tut under his breath and, as that produced no result, gave up.
Oort barely escaped becoming one with the volcanic steak-fueled repo-beast. His beloved Oortophone was not so lucky. Ultraviolet watched it get sucked down into the biological sinkhole in total horror. In went the hallway mirror, a vase full of Venetian glass dahlias, and Capo’s water bowl. It was slowing down now, but only because it was running out of fuel and room to maneuver. It reminded Oort suddenly of those little brightly colored pills he’d loved as a kid. You put them in a sinkful of water and in thirty seconds they swelled up into a big foam dinosaur you could play with. However, this was not a foam dinosaur you could play with. It was a bespoke late-model oversize, overhauled, overtorqued, guaranteed to work even in the most inhospitable environments Wearable Instant Short-Range Combat Shuttle in the limited edition Kaleidoscope of the Sea color scheme, 100 percent manufactured on Bataqliq by your ever-discreet friends at the Üürgama Conglomerate.
And it was almost finished.
Two mauve sea cucumbers shot out of the top of the infant ship and seized the gas range. Four tangerine anemones ripped down the roof, leaving them standing in a gaping sinkhole in the middle of his once-respectable neighborhood. Capo scrambled up his pant leg in a desperate panic, shrieking and leaving serious stab wounds in his calves. The Esca frowned, inasmuch as a beak like an upside-down boomerang can frown. She reached out one long, silvery-blue frond and inserted it directly into the shelter-cat’s pink ear. Capo’s eyes went wide; her pupils blew out. She didn’t shriek again. Her claws retracted and Decibel caught her as she dropped like a rock off Oort’s shoulder. Capo stared up at him, blinking furiously. Then she yawned.
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nbsp; The ship rose high above them now, a mass of living coral and understated style, swathed in translucent cerulean jellyfish-bells and swarming with every ounce of symbiotic life you could cram into a flying ecosystem the size of a blue whale.
The roadrunner trilled joyfully. Her eyes filmed over briefly, just licking the surface of their memories. “Your Uber has arrived!”
A hatch in the underside of the Üürgama Conglomerate Instant Short-Range Combat Shuttle that had, a moment ago, been a white leather couch, opened before them. Six carbonated gluco-amino exhaust ports ignited in the belly of the stern with a sound like overexcited jacuzzi jets, casting candy-cane-colored shadows on the ruins of a very nice place to live.
While Decibel Jones and Oort St. Ultraviolet still managed to stand next to each other long enough to do the occasional Where Are They Now? photo shoot, Danesh Jalo and Omar Calis?kan had, in fact, not spoken for several years. Something about their never-completed third album, variously reported as having been titled Absence Leaves the Tart to Wander, Shag and Bone Man, or Papa Needs a New Pair of Prudent Investment Portfolios. Something about an autumn night in Edinburgh.
“Dess, what is going on?” shouted Oort St. Ultraviolet in the sudden quiet, unable to maintain an upper lip of any kind for another second.
